First Page Roundup: What Your SEO Budget Should Include...

How much should you spend on SEO?

This is a question that every founder & marketing leader should be asking when building their yearly plan and budgets. And what I know from the dozens of brands I've worked with for the last 10 years is: you're probably underinvesting and underspending. I'm going to break down a quick outline on what your budget should include and how it should stack up against your yearly revenue and PPC spend...

When First Page pitches new business to tech and SaaS companies looking to grow, oftentimes it comes down to a price war against companies charging $4-5K a month for SEO services. If this is as little as your brand is investing in SEO, you're doing it wrong. If you're hiring an SEO agency that's charging $4-5K for guaranteed results: I'd question what you're getting.

When you engage an SEO agency, you need to be investing in all of the below tactics to get results. Here's what to look for in the SEO agency pitch you're receiving:

A year plan that is focused on your brand's SEO KPIs
Ongoing Monthly SEO & Content Strategy
Landing Page rewrites & optimization
Keyword research for head keywords and long-tail keywords (that is consistently reevaluated)
Technical SEO audits, updates & monitoring
Link Building outreach and backlinks
Blog strategy, blog production, and minimum 6-10 blogs per month
SEO content writing budget
Paid social budget to boost new landing pages/blogs
Monthly data analysis, reporting fixes, & dashboards

All of the above, if you're paying people who have been working in SEO for 5-10+ years as their expertise, should cost $10-15K minimum. If it's $4-5K a month, my guess is you're getting a cookie-cutter approach and a company that is doing very little or outsourcing work. This is not going to move your SEO needle to the place you want it to be.

Another thing to think about when understanding how much to invest: how much is your yearly revenue and how much do you invest in PPC? On average, this is what we see: if your annual revenue is $3-10M a year, you should be investing $12-20K in SEO per month. And your SEO/Content budget should be 10-30% of what you spend on PPC, at minimum. These numbers are just a common baseline, but it depends on a number of other factors (current marketing spend, how aggressive you need to be, SEO competitive landscape, etc).

Remember: the goal here is to be aggressive, capture *first page* search results, and get money to come in for search terms you want to target without spending $20-50 per click for them with PPC advertising. When you start to spend appropriately, you'll see the return in SEO you're looking for and start to beat out your competition in capturing new customers searching for your business products each month.

Be sure to check out this month’s roundup of articles covering everything from how we approach creating a buyer’s journey for clients to lead gen strategies and more:

Free Download: First Page Buyer's Journey Template

We're sharing our very own buyer's journey template created specifically for SaaS and Tech brands. We use this same method to confidently build out a content strategy designed to nurture contacts from leads to customers. Download yours today, customize to fit your brand's unique products and workflow and kick-off your content marketing strategy and lead generation strategy the right way.